The trigger

At first I was looking at a conference room. Multiple languages, interpretation booths, receivers to hand out and collect back, a cost that excludes nearly everyone outside major summits. The idea fit in one sentence: fit all of that into a phone.

Then I understood I was looking at the wrong problem.

What the tool actually does is not translate. It is decoupling sound from the room. A single room can carry several sounds at once, and nothing requires those sounds to say the same thing. It came to me while thinking about a concert: someone explaining live, to those who do not understand the language, what is happening on stage. That is not a translation. It is something else, and it did not exist anywhere.

From there the list grew on its own. A guide speaking to their group while two other groups walk through the same room. An audio describer painting the picture for a blind audience member. And a karachikeur — a Nigerian film narrated live by a single voice over the original soundtrack — in the Congo, doing it live over the original track. That profession already exists, it has its audience, it has never had a tool.

The problem

All the audio equipment in the world rests on one assumption: one room, one sound, one language. It works very well when everyone speaks the same one.

When that is not the case, the usual answer is equipment. Booths, radio receivers, boxes rented for the day, one technician to hand them out and another to collect them. The cost excludes nearly everyone outside major international conferences.

So a museum guide shouts to be heard over the group next door. A parish translates its service by shouting at the back of the hall. A festival gives up on audio description. And nobody calls it a technical problem, because we ended up believing it was normal.

The angle

Lobaka starts from the other end: everyone already has a receiver in their pocket.

The first product, Sasa, opens several live audio channels in a single room. Each person picks theirs on their phone and listens through their earphones. Nothing to install on the audience side, nothing to distribute on the organiser side.

The basic unit is not the language, it is the channel. A channel carries a name, a voice, and sometimes a language. "French" is a channel. "Story in Lingala" is another. "What is happening on stage, for those who do not understand" is one too.

This shift changes the market. Sasa serves more than conferences: it serves museums, theatres, parishes, festivals, classrooms, and professions that do not yet have a name.

Where the product stands

At prototype stage. The basic flow works, the redesign around the channel is under way, and the first public sessions are targeted in Algiers this autumn.

We will not publish numbers until we have real ones.

Lobaka means "speak" in Lingala.